


A Moment's Mischief

by Jade_Sabre



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-23 21:56:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16627145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_Sabre/pseuds/Jade_Sabre
Summary: Two weeks is a long time to be at sea with nothing to do.  A missing moment from Episode 41, "A Pirate's Life for Me," between the pranker and the pranked.





	A Moment's Mischief

**Author's Note:**

> I don't quite know what happened, except that Matt said that Jester would be aboard _The Mistake_ to study with Gallan and I went, "well, then, Caleb would be aboard to study with Orly," and it only seemed fitting that something like this would happen.
> 
> Unbeta'd, just a little bit of fun.

She smelled him before she saw him.  
  
Not surprising, since she was busy sitting on the floor or the deck or whatever and sticking out her tongue at a rusty nail that needed to be replaced and was refusing to part from its wooden home.  Heh.  Wood.  Nail.  Just a little more wiggling, maybe, _hee—_  
  
but anyway it wasn’t that he smelled _bad_ , at least not in that uniquely terrible way that he had when they’d met, because technically speaking they all smelled pretty awful right now since the only water available for bathing was salt water (well.  The only water available for people who didn’t worship a god cool enough to just let them Create Water whenever they wanted to freshen up a little bit, sucked to be them).  And it wasn’t really good for washing clothes, like, at all, plus it was super-hot on deck and stifling down below (unless they had the ability to use Thaumaturgy to blow open all the doors and stuff and make a breeze) (and also scare the shit out of the other deckhands but hey, at least it kept the doldrums away), and the point was that everyone smelled pretty bad, but it was all kind of the same smell.  
  
But Caleb in particular smelled of salt water baths and musty books and book holsters that he had probably never washed, like, ever, but also high-quality ink and parchment and a hint of smoke and that weird not-a-cat smell that Frumpkin made, which should have been stinky and instead just sparkled a bit inside her nose.  And the air around him was always a little heavy, maybe with sadness, like Nott thought, or maybe just the weight of knowing there were books out there that he _hadn’t read_.  
  
He didn’t say anything and she kept on wiggling the nail back and forth, clucking at it as she did so, and finally she heard him shift and cough a bit and so she said, without turning, “Can I… _help_ you?”

“Oh you know,” he said, “just coming to see what you were doing, if maybe you needed any help or anything.”  
  
“Nope,” she said cheerfully, dragging out the next syllable, “I’m good, just, you know, trying to get this little nail to come out of its little hole.”  
  
“Oh,” he said, and she went back to sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she tried to wedge her pinkie between the nail and the wood.  “Is it so hard?  I mean you are very strong.”  
  
“Like, _so_ strong,” she agreed, only succeeding in pinching her finger.  She pulled it out _heh_ and sucked on it _hee_.  “But Gallan says you have to be _gentle_.  You’ve got to coax it out, not rip it out and leave a big useless hole in the wood.  So it’s taking a little longer than it would otherwise, you know, but I’ll have it out.”  
  
“I am sure you will,” he said, not exactly encouraging, but she chose to appreciate the sentiment.  
  
“So yeah,” she said, picking up one of the various tools of which Gallan had told her the name and which she had immediately dubbed _the flattened dick_ , much to his despair.  She screwed one eye shut and started trying to slide it between the nail and the wood.  “Just…me and the nail down here.”  
  
“I see,” he said, and she idly continued her work, waiting, until finally he said, “So, you have been working on this all day?”  
  
“Oh no,” she said, “first we had to go over all the tools, and then we had to make sure the ship wasn’t leaking again, you know, and I helped hammer in some more wood down there—”  
  
“I am sure you hammered it very well,” he said, delightfully sly.  
  
“Oh yeah,” she said.  “ _So_ much wood.  Needed a _lot_ of hammering.”  
  
“Right,” he said, back to business, “and then you came up here and did this?”  
  
She put her finger back in her mouth for no particular reason—it tasted of iron, bitter on her tongue—and said, “Yeah, pretty much.  I mean I ate lunch in there at some point I guess but you know, there’s just _so_ much work to be done.”  She wanted to keep dragging it out but anticipation got the better of her.  “Have _you_ been working very hard today?”  
  
“Oh well,” he said, shifting more loudly this time, “you know, Orly and I sat down to look at the maps this morning after breakfast—”  
  
“Oh,” she said, very serious, “ _maps_.”  
  
“ _Ja_ and you see he is trying to teach me how to navigate with no stars based on the angle of the sun which you know requires lots of precise measurements and calculations and knowing the ship’s speed and well anyway,” he said, and she couldn’t help half a smile at the unwilling enthusiasm in his voice, the dork, “then we were looking at the maps and they were all backwards.”  
  
“Backwards?” she said, with great surprise in her voice.  
  
“ _Ja_ it was very strange, it was as if someone had replaced them all with mirror images of the correct ones,” he said.  
  
“Oh my,” she said.  
  
“It must have taken a lot of time,” he said, “and whoever did it must be very talented, you know, at art and stuff.”  
  
“Must be,” she agreed, nodding, absently tapping the top of the nail with the flattened dick and probably undoing all the work of the past half hour.  “ _Very_ talented.”  
  
“Right and anyway,” he said, “I was wondering if you had any idea of who might have done it.”  
  
She was grinning, now, barely bothering to fight it as she finally gave in and turned around, raising her eyebrows in innocence.  He stood with his hands shoved in his pockets, looking oddly small without his giant hobo jacket, hair a mess as always, and while he was successfully maintaining a squinty-eyed stare of suspicion she thought he might be wanting to smile, too.  “Oh,” she said, pretending to be startled, “well, my goodness, I don’t know if I know anyone on this ship who is good at art, you know, most of these people we hired for their boat skills, not their art skills—oh but you know what,” she said, rolling her eyes to the ceiling and not missing the press of his lips as he fought his own smile, “ _Orly_ is, like, a _really_ good artist.  Have you seen his tattoos?  They’re—” she splayed her hands for emphasis “—amazing.”  
  
“Indeed they are,” he said, and then he crossed his arms and put a finger to his chin and said, “but the thing is you see Orly is the one teaching me how to use the maps to navigate and so I don’t think he would—”  
  
“Maybe it’s a test.”  
  
“—I mean maybe, but he spent a good ten minutes cursing when he figured out what was wrong and couldn’t find the right maps and,” he scratched his chin, “I mean maybe he is a very good liar but I don’t think it was him.”  
  
“Oh.  Hm.  Well,” she said, steepling her fingers, “then I don’t know.  Maybe it was someone from the _Squall Eater_ hoping you’ll steer us into a reef and we’ll all drown.”  
  
He shuddered a little at that, and she didn’t think it was entirely fake.  To be fair, she sort of regretted saying it as soon as the words left her mouth, which didn’t happen very often but there had been an awful lot of drowning lately, not that it had all been bad, well, drowning was bad but being _rescued_ from drowning was pretty great, not that she’d been able to capitalize on it, not that she even knew what capitalizing on it would look like and anyway they’d all been very busy learning to be sailors and spending _too much time with the captain_ —  
  
Caleb was saying something.  She dragged her focus back to the present.  “…also half the islands are covered in tiny dicks.”  
  
“Oh,” she said, “a true _artiste_.”  
  
“They were impressively tiny,” he said, inclining his head in acknowledgment of her—of the _mysterious artiste_ ’s ability.  “And in the corner there is a tiny doorway with a path leading from it that looked sort of familiar, you know—”  
  
“Oh,” she said, alternately delighted that he recognized it and disappointed that he’d found it so quickly.  But she wasn’t surprised; very little escaped his notice, of course, and he was always saying that he could remember everything he ever saw, but as he continued squinting at her and running his hand over his scruff to hide his smirk she had the distinct impression that he’d _looked_ for it, for her own personal signature, and that was—wonderful.  “You have been blessed!”  
  
“By whom?”  
  
She touched her middle finger and her thumb together on each hand and raised them as she lifted her chin and closed her eyes.  “Our lord and savior the Traveler,” she said, singing his name, dragging out the _r_ far longer than necessary.  
  
“Through whom?”  
  
She opened one eye to squint back him; he looked unfairly skeptical.  “One of his humble servants, probably.”  
  
“I see,” he said.  “And does the Traveler want us to crash on a reef and drown?”  
  
“No,” she said, immediate and a little offended.  “But maybe he just wants to make sure you get where you’re going.”  
  
“By going in the opposite direction?” he said, skepticism in full force.  
  
“Maybe,” she said.  “Maybe it’s the right direction, and _you’re_ the one who’s going the wrong way.  Maybe you just need to change your perspective.”  
  
He— _squirmed_ at that, scratching his jaw once before shoving his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders and ducking his head and clearing his throat, avoiding her gaze.  Her eyebrows went up and she felt the whisper of a pleased chuckle on the back of her neck, but she kept her expression perfectly innocent, waiting.  
  
“ _Ja_ , well,” he said finally, “could you please tell him that for now we are quite happy with our maps being the way they were and with the way we are going and— _oh_ ,” he said, scowling for a moment before his expression went blank and he raised his eyes from the deck to her face, “maybe you should stick to carving funny patterns with your nails when you are supposed to be hammering them instead.”  
  
“Oh,” she said, confused but not particularly worried about it, delighted again, “have you noticed that?”  
  
“I don’t miss much,” he said, tapping his nose, and for a moment he relaxed again, was almost smiling.  “The one on the mast of the sea serpent where he’s got dicks for eyes is a true masterpiece.”  
  
“My best work to date,” she said solemnly, noting that he hadn’t found the one she’d scratched on the ceiling over his bed.  Give it time, and he’d be back.  
  
“Definitely impressive,” he said, and then he seemed to run out of things to say and went all staring at his boots and scuffing the deck and he was so _awkward_ and so _weird_ that it just overshadowed all the clever silliness she knew he had to be capable of, if only he’d get over…whatever it was.  It’d be a feather in the Traveler’s cap if she could coax the chaos out of him, and in the meantime…well, it was fun to watch him fidget.   
  
Finally he took a deep breath and said in a rush, looking at the room around her, “Well anyway I just thought I’d see if you knew anything so I’d better get back to it good luck with your wood.”  
  
“Thank you,” she said graciously, inclining her head.  “It’s hard work you know, being so careful and precise, but I’ll do a really good job.”  
  
“I’m sure you will,” he said.  
  
“Good luck with your navigating!” she said cheerfully, turning back to her old nemesis.  
  
“Oh thank you,” he said behind her.  “Orly does not believe I have memorized all the star charts already and so he wants me to sit and stare at them some more and anyway,” he said, “well, goodbye.”  
  
She waited until she could no longer catch the whiff of musty book on the stagnant air—she wrinkled her nose and cast another Thaumaturgy, heard the satisfying thunks and subsequent curses from various deckhands whose cabins were no longer closed—before allowing herself a delighted giggle.  Star charts?  
  
Star charts…or _googly-eyes charts_.   
  
And all the constellations would be dicks, of course.  
  
She eyed the rusty nail for another moment and then, shrugging, grabbed a pair of pliers and yanked it out before it could even creak in protest.  The hole was a _little_ bigger than maybe it should have been, but a quick Mending fixed that right up and in no time at all she had the new nail hammered in place.  Which was excellent, because she had to figure out where Orly kept his star charts.  Soon to be googly-eyes charts.

She invoked her duplicate and patted it on the head as it settled into her old spot, studiously working on a nail that was no longer there.  “Now,” she said, “you just sit here and look busy, and if Gallan comes by just wave him off, and I’ll be back soon, okay?”  
  
She made her duplicate nod, patted on the head once more for luck, and then skipped off down the passageway, humming as she went.


End file.
